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Get Australia off Microsoft

By , . About 5 minutes to read.

This morning’s Microsoft outage has crystallised a conviction which has been brewing inside me for a while. We need to move Australia away from Microsoft, and here’s why.

This isn’t the first outage that has stopped the nation from working more effectively than any Flemington horse race ever did. This Friday the 13th is just another incident in a long line of failures. Cast your mind back to July 2024, when Microsoft crashed out even worse. Yes, CrowdStrike caught the blame for that one. But everyone with CrowdStrike installed on their work MacBooks was fine, weren’t they?

Same CrowdStrike. Same Friday. The Macs kept working. The Linux boxes kept working. Eight and a half million Windows machines went blue and stayed blue, and Australia copped it first because it was Friday afternoon here. Supermarket checkouts froze. Banks froze. Flights were grounded. CrowdStrike pulled the trigger. Windows was the gun.

The ledger

January this year: Outlook down for close to ten hours. This morning: email, Teams, SharePoint, Copilot and Defender, all at once. Defender is the security product. The guard dog passed out with the rest of the house.

Microsoft’s explanation was that a number of its servers had become “unexpectedly unavailable”. Mate, same. It’s Friday. A few hours in, it admitted its fixes “have not provided the anticipated relief”. I’ve had physios like that.

And for this privilege, on 1 July they put the price up. Between 5 and 43 per cent, depending on your plan. Every year you pay more for a product that works less. Try that in any other trade. Try telling a tradie his new ute costs 40 per cent more and won’t start on Fridays.

Security company, apparently

In 2023, Chinese state hackers stole one of Microsoft’s own signing keys and used it to read the email of senior American officials. The US government’s own review board found the whole thing was preventable and said Microsoft’s security culture needed an overhaul.

Then last year ProPublica revealed that Microsoft had spent the best part of a decade using engineers based in China to maintain the Pentagon’s cloud systems. They were supervised by American “digital escorts” who often lacked the skills to understand what the engineers were typing. The US Defence Secretary called it a breach of trust.

That’s the company whose software runs most of Canberra. Sleep well.

Ask the French

Last year the French Senate put Microsoft France’s top lawyer under oath and asked him one question. Could he guarantee that French citizens’ data would never be handed to the US government without France’s permission? His answer: “No, I cannot guarantee it.”

There’s an American law called the CLOUD Act. If Washington wants the data, Washington gets the data, wherever the server sits. Paris or Sydney, it makes no difference. A data centre in Western Sydney with a kangaroo painted on the side is still an American filing cabinet.

Our response? In 2023 the Prime Minister stood in Washington and celebrated Microsoft spending $5 billion on more of them. We threw a party for our own leash. Labor did the deal, and I don’t remember the Coalition objecting. Neither side has the spine to ask who actually holds the keys to the country.

Europe has worked it out. The German state of Schleswig-Holstein is moving 30,000 public servants off Microsoft and onto Linux and LibreOffice. Denmark’s digital ministry has started down the same road. When German bureaucrats are moving faster than you, have a good hard look at yourself.

How they treat their own

Last year Microsoft sacked 16,000 people while posting record revenue and record profit. In July this year it cut another 4,800. Then, a bit over two weeks ago, 60,000 staff got an email. That’s more than a quarter of the company. Microsoft calls it a “Voluntary Exit Offer”.

Voluntary. When the boss emails a quarter of the building asking who’d like to leave, that’s a sacking with a fruit basket.

And while American workers were being shown the door, Washington approved 5,189 H-1B foreign-worker visas for Microsoft in a single year. Third-highest of any company in America. Microsoft says the visas and the layoffs are “in no way” related. Two US senators, one Republican and one Democrat, wrote to the company demanding answers anyway. When Chuck Grassley and Dick Durbin agree on something, somebody has done something spectacular.

So here’s my question for every Australian business owner. If that’s how Microsoft treats the Americans who built the place, where do you reckon a 12-person accounting firm in Toowoomba sits on its list of priorities?

And then there’s the founder

Bill Gates started having dinners with Jeffrey Epstein in 2011. Epstein had been a convicted sex offender since 2008. That was on the public record, and a man with Gates’s resources can afford a Google search. By his own account the dinners went on for three years.

In January the US Justice Department released three million pages of Epstein files, and there was Gates again. His answer was that he’d been “foolish”. A few weeks later he told his own foundation’s staff he’d had two affairs with Russian women, and insisted neither had anything to do with Epstein’s victims. Melinda has said the Epstein connection was part of why she walked.

No victim has accused Gates of anything and he denies any wrongdoing. Noted. I’m going only on what he admits to, and what he admits to is sitting down to dinner, again and again, with a convicted child sex offender.

The day those files landed, by the way, he was in Melbourne watching the women’s final at the Australian Open. He was in town to ask our government for more money for his foundation’s causes. You couldn’t write it.

Gates left the Microsoft board in 2020. The company he built is the one we’re all still chained to.

The way out

None of this is hard anymore. Macs and Linux on the desks. Email and files hosted in Australia, on open-source software, by a company that answers to Australian law. Automations rebuilt in tools you can pick up and move. AI you choose yourself, including open models running on a box in your own office that answers to nobody in Washington. Either one.

And spare me “but Copilot”. Microsoft has roughly 450 million commercial users. About 15 million of them pay for Copilot. Twenty-nine out of thirty customers looked at Microsoft’s AI and kept their wallets shut.

Every outage, Microsoft tells us it is “aggressively pursuing all pathways”. Good. Here’s one more pathway. The exit. Australia should take it.

Sources